In the wake of Intel announcing the world’s first 3-D transistor that uses 35% less energy than its counterparts, the company has now decided to kick their own energy record into oblivion. The processor giant just unveiled their Haswell CPU, a chipset that runs on nothing but direct solar power and uses 20 times less energy than equally powerful chipsets. In fact, this little bugger uses so little energy it has been displayed running off the light emitted from a regular lightbulb!

The Haswell product will be used in Intel’s “Ultrabooks”, a new group of ultra thin, fast computing machines that fit Intel’s vision of the future. This solar powered chipset does not include the rest of the computer’s hardware of course — keyboard, screen, motherboard, hard drives etc. — but the processor is a huge power drain and the upgrade in energy efficiency is expected to greatly help the overall energy retention of the computer’s batteries.

The new 22-nanometer 3D-transistor architecture promises to up the computer’s battery life to 24 full hours, and 10 days of “connected standby”. Though the rest of your computer would need to be plug-in to play, the company explains that you could turn your display off and keep your processor running while synchronizing files and doing other internet-based jobs. This hounds like a computing dream to us — as our poor two year old MacBook Pro loses power after just 30 minutes.